Page 30 of So Far Gone

age of early life? Describes most of Earth’s history? Precam- Surely someone did the readings. Precambri-? Anyone?”)

Bethany looked at the clock in the kitchen. Four minutes to four. “Can you just tell me, Peggy? We only have a few minutes

left, the kids are going to come inside at any minute, and this seems important. I don’t have time to guess.”

Peggy laughed, one of her shoulders briefly disappearing into the blurred Zoom background.

“Yes. Sorry. I just think it’s interesting: you describe years of this same feeling, of wanting to escape, to run away, to disappear.

And it seems like this might be connected to you pulling back from your father when you saw him in your house with a woman before your parents divorced.

This father who you say is more like you than anyone.

You saw something that day that wounded you, and for years, you kept it secret.

You kept his secret. Meanwhile, when life gets difficult for your dad, what does he do?

Disappears. Escapes. Like he did from you and

your mother. Like he’s done now, going to live off the grid in a farmhouse in the woods. Like you’ve always wanted to do.

Maybe this behavior was modeled for you. Maybe the urge to run comes when these men remind you of your father. And maybe you

and he have been running away from each other for twenty years.”

Here was the final frustration of therapy. That when the answer came, it was so stupidly apparent. So easy to see. Right in

front of her. She suspected that being a therapist was ultimately kind of boring—a bunch of transparent people showing up

every day, like walking aquariums, sloshing around, complaining that they couldn’t quite figure it out, but it felt like something

was swimming around inside them.

And how does that make you feel?

It made Bethany feel like a small bomb had gone off in her head. She’d always assumed the fissure with her father had opened

on Thanksgiving 2016, with the punch heard round the dinner table. But what if it had started years before that, the day she

almost lost her virginity and saw her father with another woman.

Bethany had the craziest urge—to pack up the kids, nine-year-old Leah and five-year-old Asher, and drive ten hours north,

in the middle of a global pandemic, to go see her father in the woods. To ask him if he saw her drive by with her drug-dealing

wannabe boyfriend that day when she was fifteen. To ask who that woman was on the porch with him. To ask why he was so disappointed

in her all the time. To ask how it felt to disappear from the lives of everyone who cared about you. Suddenly, she found herself

wondering if her elusive, vexing, stubborn old man might be the key to her own restless heart.

On the screen of her laptop, the therapist Peggy leaned forward. “Can I ask what you’re thinking right now, Bethany?”

“Oh, I guess I was thinking—” Bethany laughed. “Precambrian.”

“Well,” said Peggy, glancing down at her watch, “why don’t we start there next time.”

***

It was eerie, three days later, in that strange spring of 2020, to be driving on the highway with the kids, and see so few

cars on the road. For weeks, she and Shane had talked about how odd it was to see no traffic in front of their house, and

to have the sky free of airplanes and contrails. But to be totally alone on the highway? This was the strangest experience

yet. Long-haul trucks were parked on the shoulders, as if their drivers had been snatched away by aliens. A lone sheriff’s

deputy stood on an overpass, hands in his pockets, watching her drive underneath. When she did see a car, every five miles

or so, it felt almost like they were fellow survivors of some Apocalyptic disaster, Bethany thinking to herself, Where could you be going? just as the other driver must be asking themselves , Where could you be going?

Asher mostly slept in the back, in his booster seat. In the passenger seat, Leah stared out the window as they hurtled through

the stark terrain of Central Oregon and Eastern Washington: dry canyons, craters, buttes, and the sudden sharp ledges of rocky

foothills; abandoned gas stations, tumbledown barns and lonesome farms, miles and miles of wheat fields and soybean and onions,

giant metallic windmills slowly turning in the breeze. It was all so desolate, so far removed from the lush, windward side

of the Cascades. And then, suddenly, they came upon the Columbia, the massive dark river seeming to have pulled every drop

of water from the surrounding plateaus, as it carved its way through all of this rock to the sea.

When Bethany had told Shane that she wanted to go to Spokane to see her mom and then drive up to see her dad—without him—he forbade it at first. As she always did when he tried to play his recently acquired submit-yourself-to-your-husband-as-you-would-to-the-Lord card, she laughed in his face.

Then he gave her the pouty lip that signaled that his endlessly hurt feelings were once again

hurt. “Is it because of what I said to your mom about the Wuhan flu?”

“No,” she’d answered, but she thought, Yes . Celia loved Shane and wasn’t put off by his loud opinions on everything ; she knew that, beneath his born-again bluster, Shane Collins was a good man with a good heart. And a very good father. But,

as a retired nurse, Bethany’s mom had no patience for the way his weird conspiracy theories had spread to the coronavirus.

(“Does he think three million doctors and nurses got together and just... made up a worldwide pandemic? For fun? Does he

not know thousands and thousands of people are dying ? That we’re all just doing our best?”)

She and the kids would be staying in the apartment above Cortland’s garage, and only seeing her mom and her stepfather outside,

staying six feet apart, and possibly even wearing masks in the yard. And since Shane had mocked the idea of masks and quarantine

bubbles, and had continued hanging out with his buddies, making deliveries at work, going to church and to the gun range,

she didn’t feel comfortable having him around her frail, almost sixty-year-old mother and her seventy-five-year-old stepfather,

even outside and six feet apart.

But it wasn’t just that.

Bethany was also planning to go see her dad on this trip, and there was no way she was going to let Shane and Rhys near each

other again. Especially in front of the kids.

It was windy and cool when they arrived at her mother’s place.

Instantly, it was harder than she’d thought it would be, staying this far apart.

She ached to hug her rail-thin mom. It was almost easier to meet on-line than to have sweet Celia stand right in front of her and not be able to get any closer than this.

They stood awkwardly in the backyard, the slate patio table between them, her mother asking the kids the kinds of questions you’d ask strangers’ children.

“Do you miss school? Do you miss your friends?”

“I wouldn’t miss my friends if Mom would let me have a phone,” Leah said.

“Not till you’re fourteen,” Bethany said.

“Right. When I will literally be the last person in my school with a phone.”

“What about Saylor and Skye?” Asher asked. His sister spun around and glared at him, Asher’s explanation to Grandma Celia

wilting under Leah’s glare: “They’re twins and their parents are even more strict than... ours.”

Cortland kept inviting them to come inside, and Celia kept putting a hand on his arm and reminding him: “Darling, people can’t

come in the house right now, remember? There’s a new disease.”

“Oh, yes. I saw that on the news. Have you heard about this, Bethany?”

“I have, Cort.” Bethany made eye contact with her mother. “It’s very scary.” Poor old Cort. Poor old Celia.

The next day, she made sure the kids used the bathroom, and then they started driving north, toward her dad’s place. No GPS,

of course, she only had the directions Rhys had mailed her three and a half years earlier. Once they got out of the suburbs,

the forest seemed to crowd the highway on both sides, then to back away again, the tree line moving in and out like a giant

green and brown bellows. They passed farmhouses, taverns, gas stations, trailer parks. Signs pointed to dirt roads promising

lakes named for animals ( Loon and Deer ) and who-knew-what ( Jump Off Joe Lake )? Ten miles on this two-lane highway, twelve on that one, turn on this dirt road, cross that creek and turn left at the second

drive, through the birch trees. Like a treasure hunt.

Finally, she eased up his dirt driveway and parked between the cinder block house and the outhouse.

“What if he’s not home?” Leah asked.

“He’s home,” Bethany said. “Where’s he gonna go?”

And sure enough, he came walking over from the barn—or what was left of it. He appeared to be taking the structure down, piling

boards on that old 1950s flatbed truck. “Bethany?” He set a crowbar down on the truck bed, removed his work gloves, and made

his way over.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but the man striding toward her looked more like her father than the anxious, strung-out

Rhys who’d punched her husband and stormed off three and a half years earlier. The only other time she’d driven up here, the

summer after he moved in, he was halfway to recluse—long hair and beard, disheveled, complaining about raccoons. But now he

looked lean and muscled. Sharper. His salt-and-pepper hair had been recently cut and his beard was trimmed. But more than

that, there was a clarity in his eyes that hadn’t been there in the years before he left.

He wore a brown chore coat over work jeans and a faded Portland Trail Blazers T-shirt that she remembered him wearing back

in the day. He tilted his head and squinted, almost as if he suspected he might be imagining them.

“What are you... Do you... do you want to come in? I... I don’t have any...” He rubbed his hair. “I actually don’t